Chicago City Council blocks effort to weaken immigrant protections ahead of Trump inauguration

CHICAGO (CN) — The Chicago City Council on Wednesday headed off an effort to weaken municipal immigrant protections, as the country prepares for a second Trump presidential administration.

City councilors voted 39-11 in favor of tabling a measure that would have amended Chicago’s Welcoming City Ordinance, stripping the ordinance’s protections for immigrants arrested or convicted for certain crimes. Progressive city councilor Carlos Ramirez-Rosa said the lopsided vote total reflected widespread support among the City Council for preserving Chicago’s sanctuary city status. The measure was tabled without a floor debate.

“Today 39 aldermen, an overwhelming majority of the city of Chicago, came together and said ‘We are going to maintain Chicago as a sanctuary city,” Ramirez-Rosa told reporters following Wednesday’s City Council meeting.

The Welcoming City Ordinance establishes that civil immigration enforcement is the federal government’s responsibility. It bars Chicago’s city agencies from cooperating with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on immigration enforcement actions, with some exceptions. It further prohibits city agencies from requesting or disclosing peoples’ citizenship or immigration status.

The proposed amendment to the ordinance would have allowed city agencies to cooperate with federal immigration authorities when an immigrant is arrested or convicted for “gang-related,” “drug-related” or “prostitution-related” activities, or for sexual crimes involving minors. It was first introduced to the City Council in September 2023.

Though it had the support of multiple conservative city councilors at the time, the proposed amendment saw little motion before Alders Ray Lopez and Silvana Tabares filed a memo with the city clerk last week, saying they planned to discharge it from committee and call it for a vote.

That vote never happened. After Lopez moved to discharge the amendment from committee, progressive Latina alder Jessie Fuentes made her own successful motion to table Lopez’s motion. Her parliamentary maneuver keeps the Welcoming City Ordinance as it is, less than a week before President-elect Donald Trump re-takes the Oval Office and only a month after Trump’s incoming ‘border czar’ Tom Homan told Illinois Republicans that Chicago would be “ground zero” for mass deportations.

In their memo, Lopez and Tabares pitched the amendment as being in most immigrants’ best interest. They claimed rolling back the non-cooperation policy with ICE would prevent “law-abiding undocumented residents” from being caught up in federal manhunts. The pair repeated that sentiment following Wednesday’s meeting.

“What worries my colleagues and I the most is the fact that we know that the federal government will continue to come into our communities, looking for high-priority targets, and there will be collateral captures taken by ICE because we are basically saying, ‘go find them yourself,” Lopez told press.

Alderman Ramirez-Rosa, alongside Fuentes and other left-leaning Latino alders, rebutted that amending the ordinance would have made non-citizens afraid to contact emergency services and further soured immigrant communities’ relationship with the Chicago Police Department.

“We want our immigrant community to know: do not be afraid to call 9-1-1 in the city of Chicago,” Ramirez-Rosa said. “If you are in an emergency, if you are a victim of domestic violence, in no case, no exception can CPD work with ICE to deport you or a loved one.”

Lopez and Tabares didn’t say if they planned to call the amendment for another vote, but Lopez claimed their “door has always been open” for negotiations on similar measures.

Tabares further accused unspecified “critics” of the ordinance amendment of wanting mass deportations.

“These immigrant advocates, they don’t want to solve the problem… It fuels their narrative and capacity to fundraise,” she said.

Anti- immigrant animus is a major element of Trump’s political rhetoric, and he has supporters even in deep-blue Chicago. Since August 2022 the city has struggled to accommodate an influx of over 51,000 new migrants, many deliberately sent from the U.S. southern border on the orders of Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott as part of a political attack on Democrat-controlled cities.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s handling of immigration has meanwhile drawn criticism from both the right and the left. Conservative alders have criticized the hundreds of millions in public funding allocated to care for the new arrivals since 2022, while progressives and immigrant advocates have criticized decisions from Johnson’s administration on how to house and process them.

These decisions include an aborted late 2023 attempt to house the new arrivals in “base camp” tents on a south side site with soil that was suspected to be tainted with heavy metals, placing a 60-day limit on shelter stays for new immigrants in November 2023, and beginning immigrant shelter evictions in March 2024 amid a measles outbreak.

The influx of migrants has also enflamed racial tensions in the city, with some Black city leaders and organizers bemoaning what they see as the city prioritizing Latino immigrants over aid to chronically divested Black neighborhoods.

“I’ll be doggone, I don’t see the Black folks getting that kind of help,” Black Alderwoman Emma Mitts said at a City Council meeting last April, when the council approved $70 million in migrant aid. “I don’t see my kids and my children and my neighborhood getting that type of support.”

During the meeting’s public comment period on Wednesday, one speaker called Lopez and Tabares “self-hating cowards” for trying to bring the amendment for a vote. Another speaker called on “all decent people… to stop Trump MAGA fascism,” prompting an onlooker in the public gallery to shout back, “ICE, ICE baby.”

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